Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday February 04, 2009 @11:18PM
from the something-to-fall-back-on dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers, demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. 'I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,' says Wozniak. 'In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.'"

In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs.

For the sake of easy readability, I'd like to give the grammar nazis somewhere to file all of their remarks.

What about the life of a modern SSD? Is it true that they have gotten them to get within the threshold of millions of writes? Hard drives are terribly unreliable in practice, but it seems that an SSD would potentially hold up for years and years if you could do millions of writes and didn't swap to the drive. Hell why not just slap a 20GB SSD on the motherboard with linux preinstalled......? Heck, integrate it into the bios for all its worth. Can you say instant on? Maybe we will start seeing devices that can actually saturate SATA-II.....

I want to say that in 5 years the mechanical, magnetic hard drive will be dead, but something tells me that the density will give it an edge for quite a while longer than that unless some major breakthrough occurs in the manufacture of SSD.

$100 for a 120GB SSD is actually really cheap when you look at what a 4gig stick cost just a couple of years ago, so the real question is when does the cost/gigabyte ratio become equal? It would seem reasonable to assume that a SSD is much cheaper and far easier to produce than a hideously precise mechanical drive, so perhaps the answer isn't that long at all. Consider that in 2005 a 4GB thumbdrive cost roughly $33. In 2009 a 120GB SSD will cost roughly 100. (rough numbers here cost history-nazis!) Thats over an 800% decrease in price per gigabyte. Around the same time 320gb cost about $100. Now $100 will by you a 1TB drive. (maybe 1.5TB) A 300% decrease isn't bad but not at the same rate. Here is the real number though. That 1TB drive costs 0.10 per gigabyte, while the 120GB SSD costs 0.83 per gigabyte. At the current rate it seems it would likely take about 6-7 years for SSDs to become cost effective in comparison. Hell, I'm about to replace my aging 80GB SATA with another 80GB because they are like $35 or so. I don't need 80GB for just programs and whatnot. I have some big drives for the real data.....When 120GB SSDs are like $50 I'll start to get interested. Raid 0 might start to become a lot more interesting if they can prove to be reliable.